Calia Marshall
Calia Marshall has been a teaching artist with National Dance Institute for 19 years and recently created the role of Equity Advocate. In this role, she is supporting the teaching artists and the organization as a whole to increase their effectiveness, skills, knowledge and practices around race and other equity issues. Calia is a workshop facilitator, yoga instructor and musician who uses her art and spiritual practices to create spaces where folks can connect to themselves individually and that foster community building.
Presentations from Facing Race 2020
Equitable & Culturally-Relevant Dance Education
How do we create art with our students that is culturally relevant, joyful, celebrates their identities, and encourages rigorous learning through an equity lens? Through an interactive, inquiry-based format, participants will engage in an exploration of what culturally responsive and equitable pedagogy can look like for arts organizations. We’ll share some of our practices at National Dance Institute (NDI) around building an equitable classroom culture while creating evocative dance narratives in ways that both honor those whose stories we're telling and ensure cultural relevance for our students. NDI runs programs in elementary schools across NYC, programs for children with disabilities and international programs in China and Lebanon. We will share some of our learnings from working with these diverse communities and how we set up our classrooms so that students of all races, genders, abilities, and other identities feel seen and celebrated. After leading you in a sample NDI dance class for all bodies and abilities, we will discuss how we connect the dance narratives we tell to our students’ lives. Through small group work we will have an opportunity to design mini lessons around a theme, bringing in some of the tools practiced in this workshop and brainstorming ways to create culturally relevant and responsible connections for our students.
Speakers: Calia Marshall, Kay Gayner, Yakir Ben-Hur